You know, I was having a conversation with someone this morning about how interesting of a time this is for us as a church. And it's really interesting, I think, for all of us as Jesus followers. And if you're here this morning and you're not a Jesus follower, you're still kind of figuring that out, maybe you're here with someone as a guest. Um, just know that you're coming into church at a time when when it's very, very different than what we've ever experienced before. You know, it's been interesting because normally we have a lot of other stuff going on on a Sunday morning. You know, there's kids' areas and there's hundreds of children that are over there, and there's check-in that's happening, and there's a lot of buzz there, and then there's coffee. I know you guys miss the coffee. Like, who misses coffee, by the way? Can you just make some noise? Those of you that miss the coffee, it'll be back. It will be back. Um, but you know, normally there's coffee and all that kind of stuff, and there's just a lot of a lot of extra that's going on on a Sunday morning, and all of it's good, but it is it is extra. And I was talking to someone about the fact that, you know, I've been part of this church for about 14 years. I was 23 when I came here. I just turned 37 a few weeks ago, and so um it's been a lot of my life has been here. And there's never been a time in my experience here where I haven't, at the very least, been pretty focused on the extras. And it's actually been pretty powerful these last four weeks to not think about the extras and instead just to be focused 100% on the essentials. Yeah, we don't have a lot of the extra stuff going on right now, but we have worship. We have the ability to come together, to sing together, to worship our God together. That's something, by the way, that Jesus followers have been doing since there were Jesus followers. Every time you you open your mouth and you sing out to God, you're stepping into a tradition, into a practice that's been done for thousands of years. They didn't have coffee teams thousands of years ago, but they did worship. It's essential. We take Lord's Supper together. That's something that Jesus followers have been doing since the night before Jesus was was taken. They've broken bread. They've remembered what Jesus did and use that little mini meal as a time of remembrance. That's an essential. We do that together. And then we open up God's word like we're about to do, and we we focus on who he is, and we ask him to shape us and change the way we think by having an encounter with who he is and his truth. That's an essential. And so I miss all the extra stuff, and we will be adding that back. We will add back the kids' stuff, no doubt. We will add back the coffee and all those things, yes. But at the same time, I don't want to miss the beautiful opportunity that we have right now to focus on nothing but what's most important. That's actually an opportunity that doesn't happen that often in life, whether it's in your marriage, your career, or what, where you just get to strip away everything extra and focus on what's most important, on the essentials. In fact, today we're gonna have a conversation about an essential attribute of our God. Something about who he is that we we always need to remember, especially in times like these. Next week we're gonna wrap up our But Now God series that we've been in for a while, going through the book of Romans. We're gonna be in Romans for a little while. We'll take little breaks here and there, but this morning, ever since really last Sunday, I knew that this morning needed to be completely focused on who our God actually is. As I began to pray and prepare for the message, I realized that there's this essential truth about God that I need to remember, that I've actually been struggling to remember in the last few months. I don't know about you, but but life has not felt very certain these last few months. And that's been a personal thing on like a micro level. I I there's there's questions that I can't answer. And a lot of the questions aren't aren't that that big of a deal. They're not that important, you know what I mean? But like if I'm meeting with someone and they're like, oh, you're the pastor of his hands, that's like, how many people go to his hands? I'm like, I don't know. I have no idea. I could have answered that question six months ago pretty accurately, but I'm like, I have no idea. Don't know. Everything's different right now. You know, you ask me about school and and you know all the things that my kids are involved in. I can't answer those questions with certainty. There's a lot of uncertainty right now on a personal level. And then when I look at the world around me, when I look at at a macro level, I don't see more certainty. I don't know if you're someone who watches the news on a regular basis. If you're not, by the way, I completely understand you, and in some ways, more power to you. But if you are, it's just chaos. And it's chaos that leads to more chaos, and it just seems like this kind of spiral. And so, you know, personally and even outwardly, it just seems like there's so much chaos, there's so much uncertainty. And oftentimes, guys, life feels chaotic and uncertain because life actually is chaotic and uncertain. We're actually far less certain about life than we we like to pretend sometimes. But Jesus is the opposite of chaos. Hebrews chapter 13, verse 8. Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever. That's not chaos. That is not uncertainty. That's a bold statement that says Jesus Christ, our God, the one we worship, the one who came for us, the one who died for us, Jesus Christ is as certain as anything in this world. He is immovable, he is unchangeable. And I don't know about you, but but but I need something immovable and unchangeable in my life. I need something that certain to build my life on. And when life feels uncertain, when the world feels uncertain, when I see chaos everywhere, I need to I need to stop paying attention to the chaos, and I need to get my eyes on what I know is certain, and that is Jesus Christ. There's a classic story in the Bible, you've probably heard it. Even if you're someone who hasn't grown up in church, you've probably heard some version of this, Jesus walking on the water. And one of his disciples, Peter, calls out to him when he sees them walking on the water. Lord, if it's really you, call out to me, tell me to come to you. That's a statement that I guarantee you Peter instantly regretted. Like, why did I say that? Why didn't I say, hey, Jesus, if it's really you, tell Bartholomew to come out on the water. You know, Bartholomew, he's a disciple that never does anything in the Bible. So it would have been a great moment for him to shine. But Peter, he, he, he, he offered himself. And Jesus says, Yes, Peter, come to me. And Peter walks on water with Jesus. And in that moment, it was chaotic. There's a storm and there's waves and there's wind and it was crazy. But as long as Peter was focused on Jesus, he walked on the water. But the second he took his eyes off of Jesus, started focusing on the chaos around him, he sank. Now, gratefully, Jesus was right there. Jesus rescued him. He was never really in danger because he was with Jesus. But he had to get his eyes focused on what is certain, what is true, and that is Jesus Christ. Everything else is chaos. And I believe this morning we need to get our eyes like firmly fixated on Jesus Christ and really focus on who he is, on what he does. We need to know who our who our God is. There's this essential truth about God that we see actually shown often in Scripture. But it's one specifically today that I believe we need to focus on, that we need to make sure it resonates, that we plant this deep in our heart, that we believe this. We see it in Deuteronomy chapter 31, verse 8. Do not be afraid or discouraged, for the Lord will personally go ahead of you. He will be with you, he will neither fail you nor abandon you. The Lord will personally go ahead of you. God goes before you. We started going to church when I was in between the fourth and fifth grade. And uh and I loved it because I started reading scripture, and to me, the stories were just incredible and awesome, and I believed them. At the time, I was watching the X-Men cartoon when I was a kid, and so it wasn't that big of a jump to go from you know superheroes to Bible characters. It was like, cool, yeah. I didn't really have a faith crisis. I just read these being like, whoa, this is amazing. And I remember reading stories in the Old Testament of battles. I loved those stories when I was a kid. You know, stories of giant battles between the army of Israel and the other armies that were against them at the time. And there's some stories where in the battle, the spirit of God actually goes out ahead of time. The spirit of God goes before the army and actually secures the battle before the army even gets there. I remember reading those stories and just being blown away by that. I remember reading the stories of the Israelites after they escaped from Egypt and they're wandering in the desert, and they have nowhere, no way, no way to know where they're going. They've never been there before. There is no GPS, they don't have a compass. I don't even think those have been invented yet. And so, so what happens? God goes before them. Exodus chapter 13. The Lord went ahead of them. He guided them during the day with a pillar of cloud, and he provided light at night with a pillar of fire. This allowed them to travel by day or by night. And the Lord did not remove the pillar of cloud or the pillar of fire from its place in front of the people. Everywhere they went, God was before them. They were just following where he was going, and it was powerful. Sometimes I wish that I had that. You know, I wish I had just like fire in the sky, go as go this way, okay? That'd make life a lot easier. Go that way. I think about the disciples who had Jesus himself. And they just went where he went. He was the one determining where they were going, and they just followed. And that that had to have been so powerful and so personal to just know that we're just we're just walking, going where you go, but you go ahead of us. Jesus went first, and they followed. Our God goes before us. That's something, again, I read about a lot as a kid, and I believed it, but but the reality of that truth didn't really click for me until I was in my 20s. When I was in my 20s, I went to a church in Kansas City, that's where I went to college, and there was a gentleman at our church that had an amazing job, like a really cool job. He was in the Secret Service, like the legit secret service. And so he would be gone deployed for weeks, sometimes months at a time, as he was accompanying the president on a presidential detail, and he'd go wherever the president went. And then when he would get back and he'd be at our church, all us young guys were like, hey, dude, where were you? Like, what happened? Like anything cool? And looking back, I realized that the last thing he probably wanted to talk about when he was back home finally after weeks on deployment was uh was his job. But we were just so excited about having a friend that was in the secret service that we didn't really care, and he was nice enough to oblige us. And so we would ask him, hey, what happened? What happened? And he couldn't really tell us much. But one day I remember having this conversation with him, and I told him, I said, Man, it's so crazy to me that you follow the president everywhere he goes. And I can't imagine how stressful it would be to have this job where everywhere the president goes, you're right there, and you have to have your guard up and your eyes open, and you're just following the president, making sure that he's safe wherever he goes. And what he said to me, I will never forget because it it changed my perspective on God. He said, No, no, you you don't understand. He said, Everyone has the Secret Service kind of misunderstood. You think we follow the president everywhere he goes, and that's true. He said, but what you don't realize is that the president doesn't walk into a room that we're not already in. So a lot of the times I'm not following the president around. A lot of the times I'm ahead of the president. I'm in a place where he isn't, but he's about to be, and I'm making sure that before he steps in that place, it's safe. And when he said that, number one, I was like, I kind of got chills. I was like, whoa, like mind-blown kind of thing. But it clicked for me. That's that's God. That's what it means for God to go before us. That it's not just that God's with us, which by the way, he is, his spirit is with us. If you've given your life to Jesus Christ, you have the Holy Spirit with you. Is that exciting to anybody? You have the Holy Spirit with you right now, wherever you go, he's with you, he's in you, he works through you. That's a powerful truth, right? But how how amazing is it to think about the fact that not only do you have God with you, but you have God before you. That God goes ahead of you, and there's no circumstance and there's no situation that you will ever walk in that he's not already in. That he's not already working and preparing and making a way for you. If you were here last Sunday, I laughed because the whole message was about us just giving God our hearts because that's what God really wants. And I laughed because I almost reached out to Matt, who leads our worship team, and said, Hey, could we sing like Here's Your Heart or one of those songs? And this was really late in the week, and they'd already practiced and gone through everything, and you know, they planned their stuff out a long time in advance. And I was like, I don't want to create an emergency, and I don't want to do something kind of cheesy. And then I showed up last Sunday and Here's My Heart was on the set list, and I was like, oh, that's awesome. And so this last Thursday evening, I was finishing up the message, and I finished it uh like right about midnight. So it was either Thursday, Friday, early, something around that time, and the worship team had already finished practicing, and I just had this thought, like, oh, I wonder what we're singing this week. And and I open it up and there's Waymaker, and I'm like, man, this is awesome. I'm just gonna start doing this every week. I'm gonna write the message and just trust that there's a song that goes with it. But you know, we just got done singing that we our God is a Waymaker, that He makes a way for us. Do we believe that? That our God goes ahead of us, and that even when we're in a circumstance or a situation and it's uncertain to us and we don't exactly know what to do, and we don't know how it's all gonna play out, do we understand that our God, He's already been there? He's already been working and providing and securing a place for us. That our God is not just with us, but our God goes before us. There is no place you can be that He isn't. There is no place you can go that He isn't because He goes before you. Oh Lord, you have examined my heart and you know everything about me. You know when I sit down or stand up, you know my thoughts, even when I'm far away. You see me when I travel and when I rest at home. You know everything I do. You know what I'm gonna say, even before I say it, Lord. You go before me and follow me. Think about that. He's in you, he's before you, he's behind you, he's everywhere. You place your hand of blessing on my head. Such knowledge is too wonderful for me, too great for me to understand. I can never escape from your spirit. I can never get away from your presence. If I go up to heaven, you're there. If I go down to the grave, you're there. If I ride the wings of the morning, if I dwell by the furthest ocean, even there, your hand will guide me and your strength will support me. I could ask the darkness to hide me and the light around me to become night, but even in darkness I cannot hide from you. To you the night shines as bright as day. Darkness and light are the same to you. In other words, there is nowhere you can go that your God isn't. Because our God goes before us. Jeremiah 23, 23, and 24. These are uh these are these intense conversations we have a lot of times in the Old Testament where God's talking and he's asking tough questions. Am I a God who is only close at hand? says the Lord. No. I'm far away at the same time. Can anyone hide? Can anyone hide from me in a in a secret place? Am I not everywhere in all the heavens and the earth, says the Lord? Now look, if if God was your enemy, that would be terrifying. Right? Like, like if God was your enemy and he looked at you and said, Wherever you go, I'll be there. Like wherever you go, I'm already there. That's I'm gonna make a mental note. That's a conversation I'm gonna have the first time Lily brings a boy home. I'm gonna do that. Hey, young sir, I just want you to know everywhere you go tonight, I'm already gonna be there. Right? You guys have reservations for dinner at six, mine's for 545. I'll be sitting in the table right across from you. I should do that. I'm gonna do that. Those of you that have had teenage daughters, will will my daughter appreciate that or will that, no? All right. I'll figure it out when we get there. I'll figure it out. But I like that idea. Wherever you go, I'll be there. Like if God was your enemy, that would terrify you, correct? But if God is your friend, and if he loves you, and if he cares deeply for you, the idea that there's nowhere you can go where he isn't, because he goes ahead of you, he goes before you, that's that's powerful. The situation you're in right now, whether good or bad, he's already there. He was there before you got there. He was working, providing a way, making a way for you. The situations that you're gonna be in weeks from now, months from now, years from now, challenging, hardships, whatever it might be, that that you're not gonna be alone. In fact, God has already been there. He went ahead of you, and and even in those moments, he's been working and preparing, preparing for for you to get through it, preparing for you to thrive in the midst of it, that our God is always working to secure us in his love. Because he goes before us. That's a powerful truth. If God is your friend, that's a powerful truth. And in church, if you've given your life to Jesus, God is your friend. And there's nowhere you can go that he isn't. There's an amazing promise that Jesus makes in John chapter 14, verses 1 through 3. He says, Don't let your hearts be troubled. Trust in God and trust also in me. There is more than enough room in my Father's home. If this were not so, I wouldn't have told you so. I wouldn't have told you that I'm going to prepare a place for you. When everything is ready, I will come and get you so that you will always be with me where I am. This scripture tells us what Jesus is actually doing right now. He ascended to heaven before the Holy Spirit came. Now we have the Holy Spirit with us all the time. But Jesus isn't just hanging out, he's not waiting. He says that he's preparing a place for us. He's preparing a place for you. So that when that time comes and it's it's no longer life as we know it, but it's eternity, where you're at is a place that Jesus Himself has been personally preparing for you. How crazy of an idea is that? I have I have an awesome wife. Um and uh this morning, she put something in my in my office. This little uh little basketball thing, like you, you flick a ball and it goes into a little net on my desk. I'm not gonna get any work done. Um, but I'm gonna be really good at that basketball game. Give me like a week. I'm gonna own it. Uh but you know, it's just it's it's crazy to me because my wife loves me and she knows me. And so when I walk into my office, I see this little reminder that, oh yeah, she prepared for me. She she placed this here ahead of time, knowing that it would bless me. What's it gonna be like when I step into eternity? And Jesus has been preparing a place for me and for all of you for a couple thousand years, but it's gonna be nice. See, Jesus goes before us. God always goes before you, and that's certain, and you can bank on that. So when when your life feels uncertain, or when the world feels uncertain and everything feels chaotic, and you're like, I don't know what's gonna happen, I don't know what's what's gonna take place, I don't know if I'm gonna be okay, you've got to remember, no, no. God has already been here. My God has gone before me. I can trust him. He's made a way for me. We have to remember that, church. We have to remember that. A few years ago, uh one of my kids woke up from a nap and had a panic attack because he thought he was alone. Megan had taken the other kids on an errand, and I was I was in another room in the house working on something, thinking I had a little bit more time. I thought he was gonna be asleep for a little longer than he was, and so um I wasn't prepared for him to wake up. I was in a part of the house that he wouldn't have expected me to be in. And so all of a sudden I hear screams. You know, and you know, as a you know, as a parent, when you hear screams, that that's like that's terrifying. You know? Like I it's one of my biggest fears as a father is that Megan's gonna come home one day when I've been put in charge of just one of the children. And uh she can be like, what happened? I'm like, look, here, there's a story. In fact, that actually happened a few weeks back. Um, Megan was driving up home, driving to our house on our road, only to see our youngest child in a diaper running down the sidewalk with one of our neighbors chasing our baby. And then I was behind, and I was like, babe, I know this looks real bad. You know? Like, but here's what happened. I was upstairs and I was I was cleaning one of our kids' rooms, and I was with I was with with Liam, my oldest, and then Eli, the youngest, was in there and he was messing everything up, and I was trying to get him to move, and so I said, Eli, just go downstairs because mom's gonna be home soon. And he went, Mom? I went, yeah. And so he went downstairs. And about three minutes later, I came downstairs and I looked at Judah. He's my third, and I said, Hey Judah, where's Eli? And Judah just went, Oh, he went out the front door. And I was like, What? No, what? And so I go outside, and you know, in a normal situation, I wouldn't be able to scoop him up and get him in the house, and Megan would have pulled up and would have been like, How was your dad? I was like, It was great, nothing happened here, everything was great, but no, no, no, it just happened. In his mind, I guess he thought dad said mom, and that's where I saw mom go, and so he went. Now he thinks that works. So pray for us. Okay. So when I'm home with my kids, sometimes I get a little nervous. You never know what they're gonna do. So I'm home, I'm working in this room, and I hear screams. And I'm like, oh my god, what's going on? What's happening? And I run out the door and I find my child who's just a mess. I mean, they are literally like crumpled in the floor crying, and I'm like, hey, hey, buddy, I'm here, I'm here. I'm here, and there's relief. It turns out what happened is he woke up and he came down the stairs and he didn't see anybody. And so he yelled, and I didn't hear him because I was I was far off. And for a moment, my child thought he was alone. And it hit me all of a sudden that, oh, he's never ever been alone before. Like young kids, they may know what it feels like to be alone in a room, but they don't actually know what it feels like to be alone. It hit me like, oh, he's never actually been in this house by himself. And right now, he felt like he was alone. That no one else was here, and he didn't know what to do, and it caused panic and fear. But I had to remind him, I would never leave you. We would never ever leave you alone. And every single time you wake up, we're already here. And guys, that that's our God. You might feel alone, you might feel frustrated, you might feel scared sometimes, you're not alone. There is never a moment, there's never gonna be a day when you step into any situation, any circumstance where God isn't there. Because our God goes before us. We are never alone, we are never separated from God. We never ever will be. Because our God goes before us, he makes a way for us, he prepares a way for us to get through any situation, any circumstance, knowing full well that we are loved by Him, that He is all powerful, that we can put all of our faith in Him, and it's going to be okay. That's why we have scriptures like Romans chapter 8. I'm convinced that nothing can ever separate us from God's love, neither death nor life, angels nor demons, fears for today, nor worries about tomorrow. Anyone have any of those? Anyone have any fears for today or maybe worries about tomorrow? You don't have to be afraid because you're not separated from God. Not even the powers of hell can separate us from God's love. No power in the sky above or in the earth below, indeed, nothing in all creation will ever be able to separate us from the love of God that is revealed in Christ Jesus our Lord. Our God is with us, our God's with us all the time. And our God's not just with us because he goes with us. Our God goes ahead of us, our God goes before us, he is never in uncharted territory. When you step into a circumstance or a situation, a challenge in your life, God's there, he's been there, and he can look at you and say, Yeah, I knew this was gonna happen. And before you ever got to this place, I showed up and I've been working and preparing and making the way. I've been working on your heart and preparing you to be ready for this. That's who our God is. He's a way maker. And that's certain. Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever. Our culture changes. The circumstances of our world they change. Let's be honest, we change. You are not the same yesterday, today, and forever. In fact, I'm glad I'm not the same as I was before, and I'm really hopeful that I'm not the same ten years from now as I am right now, because I need to change. But Jesus doesn't. He is the same yesterday, today, and forever. He is certain. And guys, he's the only thing that's certain. He's the only thing. Take a look around. See if there's anything in this world that truly, truly feels or could claim to be certain and true. There's not, but there's Jesus. He loves you, he's with you, he goes before you, he makes a way. And if you don't know him, you got to give your life to him. Like you have to. I'm not putting pressure on you. I'm not trying to say like you have to do it right now, but but like, is there anything more certain than him? If you're a Jesus follower, like, answer that question: Is there anything more certain than Jesus Christ? No. In every phase of my life, he's the only one that's been there. He's the only one that in every situation, no matter what, I can rely on. He never lets me down. He'll never let you down. If you don't know him, you gotta know him. And if you do know him, you gotta remember who he is. He is the way maker. He never leaves you, he never abandons you. He goes before you. You can count on it, you can bank on it. Let's pray and let's worship a little bit more this morning. God, thank you so much for being our way maker. Thank you so much, God, for going ahead of us, for going before us. Lord, we we do live right now in uncertain times. We do live right now, God, in times that feel chaotic. The world that we live in right now, Lord, it is the opposite of certain. But Jesus, you are 100% certain. And because you're certain, there's things that we can be certain of. We can be certain of the fact that you're working right now on our behalf, that you're preparing a way, that you're preparing a place for us. We can be certain of the fact that you see us, that you understand us, that you have compassion on us, that you're dedicated and devoted to working on us from the inside out to make us into the people that you created us to be, Lord. We can be certain of that. We can be certain of the fact that there will be a day when every knee will bow and every tongue will confess that you are Lord, that there will be a day when every tear is wiped away, where death and sadness and sorrow are gone forever. We can be certain of the fact that right now, right here, you are with us. Because you say when two or more gather in your presence, in your name, you're with us. Lord, I pray that you give us an understanding this morning. A fresh understanding of the fact that we can count on you, that you're our God, that you go ahead of us. And there's no place we will ever be that you're not already there. Let that sink in for us this morning. Let us celebrate that, God, and let it give us hope and faith and strength. And I pray this in your name Jesus. Amen. Let's worship a little bit more. Stand up if you want to.